A Crown of Lights

14 Armageddon

NO WAY COULD she ever have imagined it was going to be like this.

She’d thought that it could never be worse than the pulpit that first time, up in Liverpool, when those three creaking wooden steps were like the steps to the gallows.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

She’d drunk very little of the spring water on offer in the green room, never once thinking of the fierce heat from the studio lights and what it might do to the irrigation of the inside of her mouth.

With ten minutes to go, she’d popped outside for a cigarette, sharing a fire-escape platform with two sly- smiling New Age warriors and their seven-inch spliff, shaking her head with a friendly, liberal smile when they’d offered it to her.

Never really imagining that the nerves wouldn’t just float away once they were on the air. Because... well, because this was trivial, trash, tabloid television, forgotten before the first editions of tomorrow’s papers got onto the streets.

This really mustn’t be taken too seriously.

Merrily froze, two thousand years of Christianity setting like concrete around her shoulders. The light was merciless and hotter than the sun. She was in terror; she couldn’t even pray.

‘Merrily Watkins,’ he’d said, ‘you’re a vicar, a woman of God. Let’s hear how you defend your creator against that kind of logic. Isn’t there really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying?’

He was slight, not very tall. His natural expression was halfway to a smile, the lips in a little V. He was light and nimble and chatty. He earned probably six times as much as a bishop – the shiny-suited, eel-like, non-stick, omnipotent John Fallon.

‘Well, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there?’

And yet, there were no tricks, no surprises. It had started, exactly as Tania Beauman had said it would, with the parents Jean and Roger Gillespie, goddess-worshippers from Taunton, Somerset, who wanted their daughter’s religion to be formally accepted at her primary school. They’d have a second child starting school next year; later a third one; they wanted new data programmed into the education machine, respectful references to new names: Isis, Artemis, Aradia. Roger was an architect with the county council; he maintained that his beliefs were fully accepted on the executive estate where the Gillespies had lived for three years.

They were both so humourless, Merrily thought, as Jean demanded parity with Islam and boring old Christianity, and special provision for her family’s celebration of the solstices and the equinoxes, the inclusion of pagan songs, at least once a week, at the school assembly.

Fallon had finally interrupted this tedious monotone. ‘And what do you do exactly, Jean? Do you hold nude ceremonies in your garden? What happens if the neighbours’ve got a barbecue going?’

‘Well, that’s just the kind of attitude we don’t get, for a start.’ Jean’s single plait hung like a fat hawser down her bosom. ‘Our rituals are private and discreet and are respected by our neighbours, who—’

‘Fine. Sure. OK.’ John Fallon had already been on the move, away from Jean, who carried on talking, although the boom-mic operator had moved on. Fallon had spun away through ninety degrees to his next interviewee: the elegant Mr Edward Bain, nothing so vulgar as King of the Witches.

‘We’re here to talk about religious belief,’ Fallon had read from the autocue at the beginning of the show, ‘and the right of people in a free society to worship their own gods. Some of you might think it’s a bit loony, even scary, but the thousands of pagan worshippers in Britain maintain that theirs is the only true religion of these islands, and they want their ceremonies – which sometimes include nudity, simulated and indeed actual sex – to be given full charitable status and full recognition from the state and the education system...’

When he had his back to Merrily, she saw the wire to his earpiece coming out of his collar, like a ruched scar on the back of his neck. Relaying instructions or suggestions, from the programme’s director in some hidden bunker.

‘Ned Bain,’ Fallon said, ‘you’re the high priest of a London coven – can we use the word “coven”? – and also a publisher and an expert on ancient religions of all kinds. I want you to tell me, simply and concisely, why you think paganism is, today, more relevant and more important to these islands than Christianity.’

And Edward Bain had sat, one leg hooked casually over the other like... like Sean had sat sometimes... a TV natural, expounding without pause, his eyes apparently on Fallon, but actually gazing beyond him across the studio. His eyes, in fact, were lazily fixed on Merrily’s... and they – she clutched her chair seat tightly – they were not Sean’s.

‘Well, for a start, they’ve had their two millennia,’ he said reasonably. ‘Two thousand years of war and divison, repression and persecution, torture, genocide... in the name of a cruel, despotic deity dreamed up in the Middle East.’

From the seats tiered behind Merrily came the swelling sound of indrawn breath, like a whistling in the eaves. Part awe, part shock, part admiration at such cool, convincing blasphemy.

‘Two thousand years of the cynical exploitation, by wealthy men, of humanity’s unquenchable yearning for spirituality... the milking of the peasants to build and maintain those great soaring cathedrals... created to harness energies they no longer even understand. Two thousand years of Christianity... a tiny, but ruinous period of Earth’s history. A single dark night of unrelenting savagery and rape.’

There was a trickle of applause. He continued to look at Merrily, his mouth downturned in sorrow but a winner’s light in his eyes. The space between them seemed to shrink, until she could almost feel the warm dusting of his breath on her face. On a huge screen above him was projected the image of a serene, bare-breasted woman wearing a tiara like a coiled snake.

‘Now it’s our turn,’ he said softly. ‘We who worship in woods and circles of rough stone. We who are not afraid to part the curtains, to peer into the mysteries from which Christianity still cowers, screaming shrilly at us to come away, come away. To us – and to the rest of you, if you care to give it any thought – Christianity is, at best, a dull screen, a block. It is anti-spiritual. It was force-fed to the conquered and brutalized natives of the old lands, who practised – as we once did, when we still had sensitivity – a natural religion, in harmony with the tides and the seasons, entirely beneficent, gentle, pacific, not rigid nor patriarchal. The Old Religion has always recognized the equality of the sexes and exalted the nurturing spirit, the spirit which can soothe and heal the Earth before it is too late.’

The trickle of applause becoming a river. John Fallon standing with folded arms and his habitual half-smile. Someone had dimmed the studio lights so that Ned Bain was haloed like a Christ figure, and when he spoke again it might have been Sean there, being reasonable, logical. Merrily began to sweat.

‘The clock of the Earth is running down. We’ve become alienated from her. We must put the last two thousand years behind us and speak to her again.’

And the river of applause fanned out into a delta among not only the myriad ranks of the pagans, but also the shop-floor workers and the wages staff and the middle and upper management of the paint factory in Walsall. The claps and cheers turned to an agony of white noise in Merrily’s head and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was the fuzzy boom-mic on a pole hanging over her head, and the camera had glided silently across like an enormous floor-polisher and John Fallon, legs apart, hands behind his back, was telling her and the millions at home, ‘... really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying? Well, Merrily... isn’t there?’

She’s frozen, Jane thought in horror, as two seconds passed.

Two entire seconds.... on Livenight! A hush in the bear pit.

‘Come on, love.’ Gerry’s hands were chivvying at the monitors. ‘You’re not in the bloody pulpit now.’

Maurice, the director, said into his microphone, ‘John, why don’t you just ask her, very gently, if she’s feeling all right?’